Mother Russia

A Q. & A. with Lara Vapnyar

This week, Lara Vapnyar’s short story “Memoirs of a Muse” appears in the magazine and here online (see Fiction). Here, with The New Yorker’s Field Maloney, Vapnyar discusses moving to America, and her Russian literary crushes.

FIELD MALONEY: You were born in Russia, and you started writing only after you emigrated to America, in 1994, when you were twenty-two. What was your life here like before you started writing? What inspired you to write fiction?

LARA VAPNYAR: I was miserable the first five years after the immigration. I missed Russia terribly, I couldn’t connect with American culture, I couldn’t find a place for myself in this country. All of my Russian friends and relatives found nice, respectable jobs very quickly and progressed at them, while I was failing at everything that I attempted to do, from teaching elderly immigrants how to speak English to learning computer programming. I avoided my Russian friends, because I was embarrassed to be around them. Loneliness and desperation made me turn to fiction.

Is it true that you learned English largely through watching soap operas?

I thought I’d start with reading in English books that I knew and loved in Russian, like Jane Austen’s novels, but in English I couldn’t appreciate the humor, the insights, or the beauty of the language; in English they seemed heavy, annoying, and boring. Reading romances and watching TV soap operas, on the other hand, was very enjoyable. The dialogue was so limited and the plots so predictable that I was always ahead of the authors, which made me feel pleasantly sarcastic and smart.

You compose in English, rather than in Russian. Why?

I never expected to become a writer in any language. Until a few years ago, I simply couldn’t imagine that I’d ever attempt to write fiction, and, having come to the U.S. ten years ago without strong knowledge of English, I didn’t expect that I’d be able to write fluently in English. Somehow these two impossibilities cancelled each other out, and I began writing fiction in English. I think I’d be more intimidated if I wrote in Russian.

Why more intimidated?

I don’t see my mistakes in English.

You live with your husband, your children, and your mother in Staten Island, and you juggle writing with family responsibilities. How did your family react to your writing successes?

I used to think that I was a very unbalanced person—easily excited, easily depressed, extremely impatient. Now I explain all this by the fact that I am a writer. Unfortunately, nobody in my family buys it. I’m still expected to be patient and calm around them. But, seriously, they all try to be very supportive of my writing, even my seven-year-old daughter, who once watched me agonizing over a blank page and said, “Don’t worry, Mommy, it will come to you.”

Your story in this week’s issue is about, among other things, a Russian girl who goes through a series of crushes on dead Russian writers, most notably Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Can you tell us about your own relationship to Dostoyevsky, and to Chekhov and to Pushkin, over the years?

As a teen-ager, I went through a series of literary obsessions with different writers. There could be a summer when I read nothing but Gogol and proclaimed him the greatest Russian writer, but by September I would switch to Dostoyevsky, only to abandon him for somebody else in a couple of months, or to return back to Gogol. And there were also writers whom I greatly admired but rarely enjoyed, like Tolstoy, for example. Chekhov has been my only steady literary relationship—I don’t remember a time when I didn’t like him, and he is still a writer whose works I constantly reread. As for crushes, I did have a tendency to fall in love with dead Russian writers, and not necessarily with the ones whose work I especially enjoyed. I’ve always thought that Pushkin was a much better poet than Lermontov, but, when it came to having a crush, I ignored the first in favor of the second. I never had a crush on Gogol, Tolstoy, or Dostoyevsky. Chekhov, yes, I have to admit, I had a huge crush on Chekhov. The humor, the sadness, the subtlety, and that pince-nez . . . I might still have a crush on him.

Why was Tolstoy hard for you to enjoy?

He can’t help but lecture at times. Often when I read his novels, I have an image of him hovering over as an annoying parent, and I want to say, “Oh, just leave me alone, let me enjoy the book.”

And why Lermontov over Pushkin?

I had a crush on him when I was fourteen, and we studied a lot of his works in school. “A Hero of Our Time” was my favorite. I imagined that Lermontov was the hero of his novel—dark, cynical, beautifully disappointed in life. I imagined he treated women badly, with condescension, and I guess I wanted him to meet at least one good woman, me.

You grew up in Russia during a very historic time. How has that affected your outlook on the world?

I feel privileged to have lived through the Soviet rule and the excitement of perestroika. I left in 1994, just a few years before the newborn Russian democracy began to deteriorate. I feel sadly privileged not to have witnessed its fall. I visited Russia this April, for the first time since I left, and, even though there were many new things that I was happy to see, there were still more appalling changes. Putin is pushing for a system based on greedy corporate economy, authoritarian control, and conservative ideology based on a mix of religion and national patriotism. I think it’s only natural that President Bush calls Putin “my friend Vladimir,” and that he is probably the only person on earth who was able to see the soul in Putin’s eyes.

How do you think History will remember these two men?

I wish History wouldn’t remember either of them.

Your story in this week’s issue is part of a forthcoming novel?

Yes. My novel tells the story of a young Russian woman, whose biggest dream is to model her life after Apollinaria Suslova, Dostoyevsky’s lover and muse. When my heroine immigrates to the U.S., she hopes to fulfill that ambition in New York. ♦

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